"Interstellar" and Christopher Nolan

This is an abridged and cleaned up version of the original article from 2014.

History

One dinner changed everything in October 2005 between Kip Thorne and Lynda Obst. Thorne is a renowned physicist leading the scientific discussion of gravitational relativity; Lynda Obst is a producer who previously worked on Flashdance, Contact, Heartbreak Hotel, and Sleepless in Seattle. They first met during the premiere of Carl Sagan's Cosmos back in 1980 and dated on and off for a couple of years.

Fast-forward to the dinner in 2005; Lynda proposed the idea of a science fiction film influenced by the science that Thorne was working his life towards. They made one rule: that it be "grounded from the outset in real science."

By February 2006, they wrote a quick treatment and gave it to Spielberg. He instantly responded and a week later it was announced that he would direct the project.

By January 2007, the treatment grew from eight to thirty-seven pages with sixteen pages just on the science. During this time, Obst and Spielberg interviewed screenwriters until they landed on Jonathan Nolan.

By November 2007, a story was put together from the collaboration between Thorne, Obst, Nolan, and Spielberg. Nolan left for three months due to the Writers Guild strike and once back, he worked for sixteen months in order to write a detailed outline along with three successive drafts.

By that time, Jonah left because he had to write the script for The Dark Knight Rises, but returned by February of 2010 to start draft number four. At the same time, Paramount and Steven had a falling out, so the project was left director-less. Less than two weeks later, Christopher Nolan and his wife-producer Emma Thomas picked it up.

J. Nolan worked with his brother professionally; he wrote the short story, “Memento Mori,” to which Memento is based on, and co-wrote the screenplays to The Prestige and the The Dark Knight trilogy with his brother.

Thorne meanwhile worked out an equation or two based on light traveling around a black hole based on Einstein’s general relativity. Thorne gave his equations to VFX supervisor Paul Franklin and his crew at Double Negative, which also worked on Inception, in order to render out an accurate model. For the heavier moments of rendering, some frames took over 100 hundreds to render and overall took up about 800 terabytes of data.

Nolan is not the filmmaker to rely on visual effects. A lot of the explosions and action sequences in The Dark Knight trilogy and Inception are somewhat real. For example, the rotating hallway zero gravity fight sequence of Inception was shot with on an angled-rotating set with the actors in harnesses. Nolan has always stood for in-camera effects as opposed to post-production work, and film over digital.

Nolan on his love for film:

“This is why I prefer film to digital,” Nolan said, turning to me. “It’s a physical object that you create, that you agree upon. The print that I have approved when I take it from here to New York and I put it on a different projector in New York, if it looks too blue, I know the projector has a problem with its mirror or its ball or whatever. Those kind of controls aren’t really possible in the digital realm."

Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema rigged IMAX cameras for handheld shots, which had never before done on this large of a scale and certainly not carried by the cinematographer himself. IMAX cameras are usually only used for action sequences because of its size, quality, and cost. Several different methods are used to capture the aerial sequences in IMAX. They strapped the cameras to the “maxatures” of the Ranger in order to get real-life NASA-types shots. The other was to place an IMAX camera in the nose of a jet. Hoytema is given practically unlimited resources when it came time to shoot this film and he took advantage.

In an article written by Nolan, he claims:

Content can be ported across phones, watches, gas-station pumps or any other screen, and the idea would be that movie theaters should acknowledge their place as just another of these "platforms," albeit with bigger screens and cup holders.

Nolan envisions a bland future for movie theater entertainment. If film is just another dial on a switch of platforms, why hold it in any special light over watching a movie at home on Netflix?

Theaters and film need to find a new way to attract viewership. This is not a new concept. When television became widely popular in the fifties as another way to view “content,” films started shooting in widescreen formats with multitrack sound in order to give the audience an experience that television couldn’t match. Nolan explains that to do this again, innovations will need experimentation, and it won’t be a fast process.

Nolan is famous for shooting and exhibiting his last three films, The Dark Knight, Inception, and The Dark Knight Rises, with a huge portion of IMAX shots and scenes. With the onset of digital projection and “liemax,” 15/70mm IMAX film projections will go extinct. Nolan even insisted to Paramount that Interstellar be released in the 15/70mm IMAX, standard 70mm, and 35mm film formats two days before the release of the film.

What is liemax? New digital IMAX projection systems came around in 2008 because the 70mm film projectors and cameras are extremely expensive. However, digital IMAX projection comes with a loss in quality. 70mm film screens have up to 8,700 lines of vertical resolution lost on the camera negative images and about 4,500 lost on the release print. Perhaps this image will clarify the difference between the digital projections versus film IMAX projection:

Digital projection IMAX proved to be cheaper and financially successful—see The Hunger Games and The Avengers. This trend of cost cutting is what Nolan is disavowing. The future of film is about funding future endeavors like film IMAX, not cutting costs to turn a profit. Financial trends from the sixties to the eighties show that experimentation and innovation are what brought great films and financial blockbusters to life. But once the studios realized that certain films could turn an enormous profit, they turned away from experimenting with new types of films and filmmakers and focused on profit. Studios made fewer films and put an enormous budget on epics and musicals, for example Ben-Hur (1959), The Ten Commandments (1956), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), The Sound of Music (1965), etc. But eventually this bubble popped, leading to the financial failure of epic films. Most notably Cleopatra (1963) leading the way with a $40 million dollar loss.

This made studios crawl and try to collect their losses and in time experiment with new ways to attract viewers. They started hiring new filmmakers with different styles and techniques (essentially inspired by the French New Wave). From this innovation away from churning out Hollywood epics, the inexpensive films—such as Bonnie and Clyde and the Graduate (both 1967)—made back their profits by tenfold in theaters. This sent the studios in a manic state. For the next decade or so, studios would try new filmmakers and styles in order to repeat the financial success of films in the late sixties.

Another trend was the age of moviegoers. Most people going to see movies in the late-sixties to seventies were teenagers and young adults. Who better to make a movie for this audience than young filmmakers? Star Wars broke every financial record known to man. Spielberg released a string of films that now somewhat defines childhood. Coppola directed a few of the greatest movies of all time. Scorsese created a new style of filmmaking that blends Hollywood and European art cinema.

Filmmakers like Spielberg and Lucas came into Hollywood with the idea of making films to appeal to the masses. To which they had unprecedented success. Jaws made a tenfold yield in profit after a month of its release and the Indiana Jones trilogy made about $62 million just on opening weekend. However, the real winner is Lucas’ Star Wars trilogy. Each installment destroyed the box office and created a newfound merchandising yield. Disney later bought Lucasfilm for over $4 billion, while the original budget of Star Wars—the film that made this buyout possible—was made for only $11 million.

By March 2013, Nolan confirmed his directing ambition for Interstellar and agreed to produce the film under his production company, Syncopy. Nolan’s salary for the film included a flat $20 million as well as 20% of the gross. This is Nolan’s first time making a film under a non-Warner Bros. production house—Paramount Pictures in this case. Warner Bros. wanted in so bad that they actually gave Paramount the rights to Friday the 13th and South Park: Bigger Longer & Uncut sequels. In return, Warner Bros. was given international distribution rights. That is not a bad deal, considering Transformers: Age of Extinction grossed over $840 million internationally in less than four months.

The production budget for Interstellar was about $165 million, making it the third most expensive Nolan film—The Dark Knight ($185 million) and The Dark Knight Rises ($250 million). For a 169-minute movie, the cost of Interstellar comes out to be $976,331.36 per minute. For that price per minute, you can buy—not just rent—a three-bed, two-bath condominium in New York or an estate in Montana with twenty acres of property (with a 2014 dollar value).

By August 2013, Legendary Pictures and Warner Bros. agreed to finance 25 percent of Interstellar’s production. Legendary also agreed to finance Warner Bros. upcoming DC superhero film, Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice for a ticket into the Interstellar production. The original four month shooting project began the same month.

This is the fifth collaboration between Nolan and composer Hans Zimmer. The usual Nolan-Zimmer soundtrack features bass shattering DUMMMMS and high pitch strings that have been reproduced often by other composers since Inception came ou, which won the Oscars for sound editing and mixing. Nolan approached Zimmer with the idea for creating a new sound:

It’s time to reinvent. The endless string (ostinatos) need to go by the wayside, the big drums are probably in the bin.

This type of soundtrack reinvention worked for Inception, and now that its sound became the normal, it is time to reinvent again. Nolan didn’t even show Zimmer the full script, but instead a “one page text” with a description of the type of sound Nolan wanted for the film.

Criticism/Discussion

The biggest problem with this film is the sound mixing. It may have been the speakers’ fault in the theater, but the sound levels were definitely off at times. This film contains loud spaceships and a sweeping orchestra, which will give any sound mixer a headache when trying to lodge dialogue somewhere in between.

A lot of critics and writers are talking about Interstellar as being the revival of the Hollywood blockbuster. To continue from the section a few words ago, this film follows the trends in history to make it a revival piece. In the last half-decade or so, everything being made on a large scale is a sequel, remake/reboot, or adaptation. The studios are scared shitless to risk big on an original idea recently due to the ‘08 recession. Also, Disney lost over $300 million with John Carter and again with The Lone Ranger (2013) with over $100 million. Disney will no doubt bounce back from this considering they own Star Wars and will reap the benefits from the new trilogy and merchandising. The other studios do not have this wiggle room unfortunately.

I want to talk about love and how it works in this film. Love is the reason many of the characters do what they do, much like in real life. Love causes us to perform functions we would not normally do. Love has no physical manifestation; it has no physical being in our three-dimensional world without humans. Love is so powerful that it can even hinder our genetic identity. Humans are naturally predisposed for survival and spreading successors. We don't really need love in order for those two conditions to be met, but it still happens. Love throws us off our genetic pathway; nothing else has that power over us.

This feeling is what attracts Amelia to Dr. Edmunds; it’s what attracts Dr. Mann to the planet he left; it’s what attracts Cooper to launch into the unknown; it’s what attracts Murph to work with Dr. Brand at NASA; its what attracts Cooper to Amelia even when he is safely back on his house floating around Saturn; and more than all, it’s what attracts the characters into save humanity.

The point of separation between Nolan and other filmmakers is the amount of thought put into each film. It’s not that the viewer needs to decode each of his films, but rather navigate through them like a maze. Tom Shone writes:

If Hollywood has long offered audiences the promise of escape, Nolan’s films nail it down still further: he offers audiences the chance to escape their heads. The name of his production company, Syncopy, is the word for the temporary loss of consciousness caused by loss of oxygen to the brain, and all his films, to some extent, use the tropes of the detective film or heist movie to dramatize the twists and turns of consciousness. “We can’t step outside our own heads,” he told me at Fotokem. “We just can’t. Now, a great film will reveal that the world is way fucking worse than you think it is and you missed it. It should be depressing but the reason it’s not is, we want the world to be more complicated than it is. We don’t want to know the limits of your world. You don’t want to be like Truman in the boat at the end, hitting the sky. What it’s really saying is, there’s more to this place than meets the eye. I make films that are huge endorsements of that idea.”

If Nolan’s success has in large part depended on an audience of little Nolans, notepads out, faces scrunched up as they attempt to outwit the master from the front row, the film-maker found himself, as he approached the release of Interstellar, in the unusual position of pivoting towards encouraging a more limbic, left-brained response to his work. The only praise that made him a little uncomfortable was praise for the complexity of his films. “What I’ve found is, people who let my films wash over them – who don’t treat it like a crossword puzzle, or like there is a test afterwards – they get the most out of the film,” he said. “I have done various things in my career, including, with Memento, telling a very simple story in an incredibly complex way. Inception is a very complicated story told in a very complicated way. Interstellar is very upfront about being simple as a story.

Edited: 19 March 2021